The Greatest Discovery

If only he'd found them first: the twin black holes, spinning around each other like crushing dynamos, abysmal toy tops of the Universe. But no, that honor belonged to the astronomical team at _____ University, undoubtedly now basking in the fame of every major scientific journal, along with the guaranteed grants to continue their research. He had not even discovered the massive black hole twirling at the core of our own galaxy, and that had been his pet project for years, bound by the no longer seemingly foolish conviction that there was some connection between such imposing gravity and the energy fields of star systems. It had not been his name on the article. No, instead he'd gone out and gotten drunk with the molecular biologists, one of their experiential experiments on cell decay, and on his way home he had been jumped by a pair of hoodlums, they could have been twins in their identical skull masks, their cloth teeth chattering at his absolute inability to defend himself. It had taken the better part of the week to cancel and renew his credit card, replace his license and security badge. In fact, all that he had really lost, beyond the time in which he should have been the one to discover the black holes, was his wallet, a worn leather thing it'd been about time to replace anyway.

And so there he was, at Wal-Mart, or Target, with a new wallet in one hand and his new MasterCard in the other. After the cashier rang him out he opened the wallet to put the card inside, and found there, in one of the black pockets, ten teeth, ten human teeth. One of them had a filling. He was horrified, and despite the profuse apologies of the clerk, he hurried out, not taking the wallet or even the teeth he had paid for, and without giving his name to the reporter who had suddenly materialized, as if through matter transference, and tried to assure him that finding these teeth might prove to be the greatest discovery since Galileo found the moons of Jupiter.